Two hours before game time on a rainy May afternoon in New York, the visitors' clubhouse at Citi
Field is peaceful.

Pat Burrell, a left fielder for the San Francisco Giants, and Javier Lopez, a relief pitcher,
play cards at a prime spot in the center, exercising their veteran prerogative.

A few younger teammates idly watch television.

In the hallway outside, however, some creeping pre-game tension is found.

There, the producers and cameramen of the new Showtime series
The Franchise: A Season With the San Francisco Giants are keeping up a game-day ritual of
their own: standing around and waiting, trying to stay out of the way and remaining ready for
something - anything - to happen.

The lulling pace of a baseball game represents an all-day proposition for a baseball
documentarian, whose existence occupies a perpetual seventh-inning stretch.

"Eighty percent of our time is waiting to get access," Gary Waksman, the supervising producer,
said as he kept an eye on the comings and goings of players, coaches and team executives.

"I get nervous when a cameraman has to go to the bathroom."

Waksman and his crews from Major League Baseball Productions are in the middle of an eight-month
stint filming and editing the on- and off-field lives of the Giants, the defending World Series
champions.

Other documentary TV series have focused on professional team sports, including the football
training-camp show
Hard Knocks on HBO and the baseball shows
The Pen (about the Philadelphia Phillies bullpen) and
The Club (about the Chicago White Sox front office) on the MLB Network.

But
The Franchise - to premiere tonight - falls on a different scale, following an entire team
for nearly an entire season. (The last episode is scheduled for Aug. 31.)

As they search for characters, storylines and serendipitous TV moments, the producers are
tracking 25 active players; other players on the disabled list and in the minors; the manager,
Bruce Bochy; and the general manager, Brian Sabean - a job exceeding that of
19 Kids and Counting.

And they're doing it in an environment that, though not hostile, isn't entirely friendly,
either. Baseball players guard their privacy as jealously as any other professional athletes and
value their routines and refuges more than most. The makers of
The Franchise might be part of the Major League Baseball family, but that doesn't mean
that players are much more than polite to them while passing on their way to the trainer's room or
the batting cage.

As the evening game against the New York Mets approaches, the crew's efforts to drum up good
television are meeting with mixed results. A plan to put a microphone on pitcher Sergio Romo during
a game - to eavesdrop on the Giants' colorful relief corps - has been on "our wish list of what we
call tasty sides," said Michael Sullivan, a coordinating producer.

Romo eventually said no.

The tensions between privacy and accommodation, and between baseball and celebrity
entertainment, are embodied in the night's biggest "get": footage of Aubrey Huff, the Giants' first
baseman and leading hitter, as he sits in the clubhouse and watches himself on television. Huff and
several of his teammates are analyzing his performance on an MLB Network talk show earlier in the
day.

Huff endures the hall-of-mirrors spectacle for a while, as the boom mike hovers and the camera
pans between his face and the TV screen. But, before his segment comes on, he retreats to the
private sanctuary of the trainer's room. A hasty negotiation results in a single crew member with a
smaller camera being allowed in - a first-time concession that the producers will speak of in
hushed tones.

The efforts are all part of Major League Baseball's evolving bid to get its brand in front of as
many eyeballs as possible. Its production arm came up with the concept for
The Franchise, then shopped it to various networks.

The Giants - with their combination of on-field success and colorful personalities, including
the heavily bearded, media-savvy relief pitcher Brian Wilson - were a natural choice to star in the
show.

Showtime was a good fit, in part, because David Nevins, the network's entertainment president,
was an executive producer of the fictional sports series
Friday Night Lights, a favorite of several Giants executives.

"Having done
Friday Night Lights, I've heard every variation of a scripted show about professional
sports, and it's very hard to capture it in a real way," Nevins said. "Here, we would have access
no one's ever had before, and that would make for a very exciting television show."

The season has progressed well both for the Giants and
The Franchise. Success has come despite a remarkable series of injuries that felled most
of the team's top hitters - a wave of adversity that provides honest drama for the show.

Even more valuable, strictly from a storytelling perspective, is that one of the injuries is
among the most-talked-about moments of the season: On May 25, catcher Buster Posey, the 2010
National League rookie of the year, was knocked down in a violent collision at home plate and lost
for the season with leg injuries.

The access that
The Franchise enjoys means that the show will include an interview with Posey about the
play, which has sparked a discussion about whether the rulebook should be changed to prevent
runners from barreling into catchers.

Yet the scene the producers are really excited about encompasses one of those serendipitous,
hurry-up-and-wait moments.

A camera follows rookie Brandon Belt as he walks into AT&T Park, the Giants' home stadium,
the day after the injury to take Posey's place on the roster. Driving past in the opposite
direction is a small cart bearing human cargo: Posey, his face drawn, his leg immobilized. Belt
glances over but doesn't speak until the cart is out of earshot.

"That don't look good," he says to no one in particular.

Discussing the material that the Giants' season has given them, Sullivan explained: "You don't
want someone to lose their season. But it's a storyline."